With Jo, he’d bellowed so loud the whole city had heard it. Why would he want to be with others when he’d liked her best?
They’d been good together.
Briefly. Before he’d decided to kill her and all.
When would it be her turn to find a partner to hold her hand? She pined for her own groom, one who’d gaze into her eyes and tell her, “You are everything.”
But pining was a problem. Whenever she was filled with yearning like this and she did manage to doze off, she risked her own type of sleepwalking.
Sleep-ghosting.
She would go intangible, sinking through her bed, through the floor, and then into the ground. Nothing could awaken her before she opened her eyes to total blackness, shrieking and scrabbling for the surface.
If she ever solidified underground, she could die—already entombed.
Worse, what if she didn’t sink? What if she floated? The stars seemed to beckon her. . . .
Finally Jo relaxed enough to drift off, and the strangest dream arose. She was in a boggy field, toiling under a scorching sun. She wiped her gritty forearm over her sweat-drenched face.
No, not her arm. Not her face.
Rune’s? Somehow she was seeing a scene from his point of view.
The castle’s bells tolled. His head whipped toward the sound. My father is dead. The mortality curse that had befallen Sylvan’s leader had ended even a regent’s immortal existence.
Serves you right for trying to colonize the Wiccae realm, old king. Rune felt no sympathy for the distant sire who’d spared his life but had never graced his bastard with a spoken word.
The demon slaves who worked these fens shoulder to shoulder with Rune turned away. To them, a baneblood like him was already dead, and good riddance. They feared his poison. They wondered why he hadn’t been stoned to death as an infant like all the other dark fey halflings.
Perhaps that would have been a mercy.
Because with the king’s death comes mine.
For all his fifteen years, he’d known his days were numbered. But when the king had fallen in battle, bespelled by a warlock general, Rune had thought he’d have at least a few weeks more to plan.
Now panic filled him. How to escape? The queen’s demon guards would soon come for him.
For his head.
His eyes darted. Crossing the fens with no food or fresh water would be suicide. He bared a claw, drawing blood to ink an invisibility spell on his forearm. His powers were undeveloped. Maybe this time the combinations of runes would work.
As his black blood spilled, laborers swooped up their young and fled, cursing him to the hells.
Frustration boiled inside him, and he yelled, “I never wanted to be like this!”
Concentrate. Another carefully crafted symbol. Just as his dam had taught him. Only one more left—
Royal guards traced into the fields, seizing him.
He fought wildly, but the guards’ armor repelled his claws and fangs. The demons had already transitioned into full immortality, were massive brutes. They bound his hands to prevent his clawing. They muzzled him to prevent his bites.
Taking me to the executioner.
Yet once they’d beaten him down into the mud, they made no journey to the block. They hauled him to a bathhouse, stripping him and scrubbing his skin like an animal’s.
As he’d thought daily since he could remember: Gods give me the power to destroy Sylvan’s royal house. His colonizing, slaving, rapist father had succumbed, but what of the rest of his execrable line? The now-widowed queen and her spawn, Rune’s half siblings.
The guards dressed him in fine breeches, a billowing shirt, and shoes that pinched his feet. Leaving his hand bindings, they removed the muzzle, then traced him into an echoing chamber.
Unused to teleporting, Rune wobbled on his feet. Was this . . . the royal court? They must’ve taken him to the capital, to the Forest of Three Bridges. He gawked at the riches around him.
A single female awaited him: Magh the Canny, the queen who loathed him, begrudged his very life.
A mere scratch across her neck would bring her to her knees. But he could do nothing with his hands bound. The guards would block him before he could get his fangs into her.
She was seated upon her elaborate throne, her cutting blue eyes studying him. “You refuse to bow before your regent?” Her crown was a circlet of polished gold, and it rested far too comfortably atop her regal blond head.
Seething, Rune forced himself to bow.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I’ve survived the fens for fifteen years.” He was strong and hardened, could do the work of two adult demons.
“Such bravado, cur.”
“My name is Rune.”
Her eyes gleamed at his challenge. “Your face isn’t handsome. And yet I understand you’ve made many conquests among the highborn females of this kingdom.”